2016.10.02 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Bernhard Nickel, Between Logic and the World: An Integrated Theory of Generics, Oxford University Press, 2016, 277pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199640003.
Reviewed by Rachel Katharine Sterken, University of Oslo
Some theorists, faced with the seemingly impossible task of coming up with an adequate semantic theory of generic sentences, eschew semantic theory entirely and locate the interesting properties of generics in the metaphysics of what we might call, genericity. Such a metaphysical theory is allowed to be unsystematic in a way that the semantic theory cannot be, allowing such theorists to place the philosophically interesting phenomenon that seems to underlie generic meaning, outside of the semantic theory altogether. Noteworthy recent examples include Sarah-Jane Leslie who sees genericity as a fundamentally mental phenomenon (cf. Leslie, 2007, p. 386, on the "worldly truth-makers" of generics), and. . .